Last Sunday afternoon, September 15, the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, under conductor and artistic director Daniel Meyer, opened its season with an imaginatively varied concert at The Temple-Tifereth Israel. Amitai Vardi was featured in Srul Irving Glick’s The Klezmer’s Wedding, a delightful one-movement piece for clarinet and string orchestra.

Israeli cellist Amit Peled is a warm person, a deep thinker, and a big Cavaliers fan — all equally important aspects of any great artist’s personality.

Next week, from May 15-19, Peled and guest conductor Mélisse Brunet will make their debuts with CityMusic Cleveland in five free concerts around the area to conclude the ensemble’s 15th season.

The title “Hidden Gems” certainly describes three of the four works on the program: Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C, Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 2, and Kodály’s Dances of Galánta.

Not so for Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto. “It’s a piece that we all play as teenagers — one of the first we encounter as quote-unquote serious cellists,” Peled told me during a trip to Europe, where he was to perform in Romania and Austria. For him, the Saint-Saëns was also one of the first concertos he performed with orchestra. “I will never forget the feeling of that first chord, and after that the explosion of emotion and the mastery of cello writing,” he said.

Having served in the U.S. army during World War II, oboist John de Lancie had the opportunity to meet Richard Strauss at his home in a Bavarian resort town following the war. He asked the composer if he had ever thought about writing an oboe concerto — Strauss said that he hadn’t.

And then, suddenly, the composer had. His Oboe Concerto would be premiered just months later in Zürich. And what a concerto it was — and is. As Cleveland Orchestra principal oboe Frank Rosenwein (above) told me during a recent phone call, “it stands at the pinnacle of oboe writing in terms of its beauty, but also its difficulty.”

Rosenwein will play the Strauss Concerto with CityMusic Cleveland and principal guest conductor Stefan Willich in five free performances this week. As is the orchestra’s custom, the concerts will jump from venue to venue each day from Wednesday, December 12 through Sunday, December 16 (details below).

The Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at the Temple Tifereth-Israel on the campus of Case Western Reserve University will present a new Silver Hall Concert Series. The performances begin this weekend with the annual Showcase Concert presented by the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society on September 15, and continue with the Cleveland Chamber Choir on September 23. The series will comprise nineteen free concerts featuring professional and semi-professional ensembles from greater Cleveland in the 1,200-seat Silver Hall Auditorium (a full concert calendar is below).

The idea of shimmering silver is certainly a fitting concept to describe the Series, presented in partnership with CWRU. Renovated in 2015, Silver Hall Auditorium now includes state-of-the art recording and live-streaming capability. This Series marks the Maltz Center’s new venture into presenting.

Randall Barnes, executive director of the Maltz Center, said the Series tackles several key components that help to define the niche of the Center. “First, the celebration of the musical artistry of our students through the CWRU Music Department ensembles; second, the professional and semi-professional talent of the greater Cleveland area ensembles showcased here; and finally, the intersection of technology and heritage by delivering one-of-a-kind performances both in-person and live-streamed from Silver Hall, the historical showpiece of the Maltz Performing Arts Center.”

Re•Views

“I am sitting in a room,” intones the composer Alvin Lucier, announcing the title of the composition he is recording before clarifying: “…different from the one you are sitting in now.” As stay-at-home orders arose in March 2020, music-lovers on social media noted that Lucier’s half century-old audio piece could serve as an unlikely quarantine anthem.

Enter the soprano Stephanie Lamprea, last heard in Cleveland during the 2019 Re:Sound Festival, making some of the lockdown era’s most vivid new music through an approach that inverts everything that defines Lucier’s piece — except, of course, for the isolation.

A new CD by Christa Rakich, who is currently Visiting Professor of Organ at the Oberlin Conservatory, gives a nod in two directions. As its title announces, it’s an homage to her former teacher and colleague, the late Yuko Hayashi, longtime professor at the New England Conservatory and curator of Boston’s Old West Church Organ Series. It’s also the first recording to be made of Richards, Fowkes & Co.’s Opus 16 instrument, built in 2008 for Goodson Chapel of the Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. [Read on…]

On their recent, self-titled debut album, the Cleveland-based duo Patchwork — Noa Even and Stephen Klunk — present five commissioned works that draw on free jazz, metal, progressive rock, and the avant-garde. Released on New Focus Records, the album takes you to a sonic world never dreamed possible from a saxophone and drum set duo. As we have come to expect from Even and Klunk, the five works are an exploration of extended techniques. More importantly, their performances are bewitching — ensemble playing at its best.

Hailed by the New York Times as “The Best Classical Music Ensemble of 2018,” Wet Ink Ensemble has lived up to this acclaim once again with their recent release Glossolalia/Lines on Black. The album takes its name from the two extended works by Wet Ink members Alex Mincek (saxophone) and Sam Pluta (electronics). The remainder of the septet includes Eric Wubbels (piano), Erin Lesser (flutes), Ian Antonio (percussion), Josh Modney (violin), and Kate Soper (voice). [Read on…]

Croatian-born pianist Martina Filjak, now living in Berlin, has released her latest album, Light and Darkness, featuring music by Franz Liszt — plus an epilogue by Arvo Pärt. The disc confirms once again all the special technical and interpretive qualities that won her the gold medal at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2009. [Read on…]